Thursday, September 22, 2016

The Great American Cultural Revolution advances. It gains
new territory and seeks out hegemony. It wants to control your mind and it has
discovered that the best way to do it is to force you to disconnect from reality.

It’s slogan is: narrative uber alles. In other terms,
reality is what the culture leaders say it is. If you do not agree, shut up!
You are a bigot.

If a black policeman shoots an armed black suspect the fault
lies with white racism.

If blacks riot in Charlotte, the fault lies with their being
disenfranchised and having no voice, thus, no vote.

The clearest sign of the disenfranchisement of
African-Americans is that the president and the attorney general and the
secretary of homeland security and many other top government officials are
black.

If blacks kill blacks in record numbers in Chicago and other
major American cities, the fault lies with white racism.

If a biologically male human being thinks that he is a
woman, then he is a woman. If you don’t agree you are a bigot and will be sent
away for thought reform.

If a woman dresses in a provocative manner, you have no
right to judge her. If fact, you have no idea to judge anyone for ill no matter
what they do. (Perhaps, they will make an exception for the case of Anthony
Weiner.) If a woman acts like a slut you have no right to say or think anything
of it. It’s her business, not yours.

If a woman says that she was raped, she is telling the
truth. Her accused has no right to due process of law. He can be hauled before
a campus tribunal and expelled. It doesn’t matter if the woman is shown to be a
liar. What matters is that he is a white male and while males are joined in a
criminal conspiracy to oppress the downtrodden and disadvantaged. It never
crosses anyone’s mind that some people enjoy privileges because they have
earned them.

If a white person does something wrong, his action reflects
on all white people. If a black person does something wrong, his action
reflects only on himself. If a Muslim commits a terrorist action, you have not
right to think or to speak ill of Muslims. If you are working for the Obama
administration, you cannot say that the terrorist was a Muslim.

Reality is what Obama says it is, not what it is.
Ransom is not ransom when he says it’s not ransom.

If Obama says that a no-account government official, someone
who owes her fancy resume to her husband’s name and who has never accomplished anything
of consequence, is the most qualified person ever to run for the office of
presidency, she is the most qualified person ever to run for the office of the
presidency.

And naturally, the economy is the best it’s ever been. The
Middle East has become a Worker’s Paradise. The refugees who responded to the
Obama-Clinton policies in Syria and Libya by overrunning Europe are going to
save the continent from racism and sexism.

If you do not believe these things, you are a bigot and will
be sent into the countryside to shovel pig manure.

Ross Douthat traveled to the outer limits of the television
landscape and discovered that many talk show hosts-- stand-up comedians who are
not funny-- have become agents of indoctrination. They are not telling jokes,
but are mainlining propaganda into gullible young minds.

The problem, Douthat explains, is not Jimmy Fallon who runs
a talk show on NBC and tends to be apolitical. The problem is a dimwitted
comedienne named Samatha Bee who rails against Fallon and everyone else because
she feels compelled to use her comedy routines to fight institutional racism
and sexism and social injustice.

For the record Bee’s show has something to do with being “full
frontal.” Of course, if she really did appear “full frontal” she might have an
audience. As of now, she does not.

In Douthat’s words:

Some of
them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to
flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown
liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s
lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the
imagination struggles to escape.

The revolution has advanced so far, Douthat says, that it
has invaded the hitherto sacred male domain of sports. His point is well taken:

Meanwhile,
institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have
been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis
of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A.,
N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are
acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture
remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives
Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

Since Kaepernick is displaying a lack of patriotism, his
protest must, our president says, be respected as an act of spirited dissent.
If you hate America, you become a hero in the Age of Obama. If you riot and
burn down your neighborhood, you are expressing your outrage over slavery in the
Age of Obama.

It isn’t just about shutting down debate. It’s about
undermining the bases for debate. It’s about denying that there is any such
thing as reality, an objective reference we can use to solve disputes.

The effort at mind control, seen so clearly in the
transgender debate, requires that you be judged by your ideological commitment.
Your ideological commitment is more pure when you do not allow reality to
intrude on your thought. You can never again allow reality to refute or throw
into doubt your most deeply held beliefs. This is especially true if you are a
stand-up comedian and know nothing of reality, anyway.

According to Douthat, many people have been drawn to the
candidacy of Donald Trump because he has been willing to stand up against
political correctness:

At the
same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the
left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural
rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in
the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s
government.

This
spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James
Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics
that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain
angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve
Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols,
Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s
the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver
explaining the news to you, forever.

Trump’s
extremism also limits his appeal, of course. But if liberals are fortunate to
be facing a Johnny Rotten figure in this presidential campaign, they are still
having real trouble putting him away … and if he were somewhat less volatile
and bigoted and gross, liberalism would be poised to close its era of cultural
ascendance by watching all three branches of government pass back into
conservative hands.

How do you undo the damage done by Barack Obama? In the Age
of Obama it makes some sense that the Republican candidate would have fewer
qualifications than the no-account and weaker Democrat.

So, people are voting for the tough guy. They are voting for
a guy who seems like more of a guy than Hillary. True, he is a bit metrosexual—that
hairdo-- and he seems to be a ladies’ man, but he does not give a damn about
political correctness. He is an equal opportunity offender. He will smite the culture
warriors… and that seems to be all that
matters.

Trump’s supporters like him for being rude and crude and
offensive. He will not spend his time trying to justify himself to the stand-up
comedians.

Douthat concludes:

But it
remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party,
that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many
Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.

Now, enquiring minds want to know whether a President Trump will arrest the Gang of Four.

8 comments:

I think what pundits, libs and others miss about the ascendance of Trump, is that the working class sees him as one of us. He is a builder for God's sake, not a lifetime pariah, er politician, who has never contributed anything material to the world.

He is also successful and has presided over thousands of employees, so he is not without some knowledge of how to get through problems.

As to his supposed need to control everything and do it his way, we little people know this is BS, because his buildings are still standing, therefore common sense tells us that he actually does listen to the experts, i.e. engineers, architecs, contractors, etc., etc., etc.

The cream on top is his give no fucks attitude, and a smart ploy during the primaries to get to the point where today, (as he understood would happen) as all of the lefts' might is thrown at him (west wing trolling, er, campaigning in Ohio for the Hillary, really?)is barely registering as yet.

I think if he wins, it shows the Trump is a lot more savvy and has a better finger on the pulse then most elites would admit..

Now I see that Hillary has got Josh Wheedon and the "Super Hero" actors to help her win.

She just does not get it. The more you trot out these filthy rich elites, and get them to tell the deplorables how to think and vote, the more you are driving them into Trump's camp.

Maybe we have been looking at this all wrong. At one time it was proposed that Trump was a plant to get Hillary elected. Yet we know that the Clinton's will do anything for money, Maybe, just maybe it is Hillary who is the plant!

HOWEVER, what I DO like is who it bothers, and the degree to which it bothers them. It's a delight to watch these sophisticated journalists, activists and academics go apoplectic at each Trumpian syllable.

He's the gift that keeps on giving. But he's now beyond rude, crude and offensive... he has message discipline. It's the rude, crude and offensive reactions of his opponents that provide entertainment for me. The popcorn maker has been running nonstop in our household for weeks now.

The Left has attacked my values and my way of life for decades. It's fun to see the tables turned, and the possibility of the clock turning back. Trump may not be able to reverse the Leftist rampage, but a Trump presidency may be our way of pressing the pause button.

Stuart: If blacks kill blacks in record numbers in Chicago and other major American cities, the fault lies with white racism.

The funny thing about claimed facts is that you can check them. Do records reset every year? Every decade? Do 1 year trends count?

While the current total of 530 so far in 2016 is horrendous, and August was a high month of 93, the projected total for 2016 might be about 650 with calming cold weather coming, which puts us back to 2002 totals, but far below the 970 from 1974.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago#Annual_homicide_totals_by_year

But I will agree "blame games" are bad, like when BLM focuses exclusively on stupid police shooting of unarmed black citizens. BLM can correctly demand better police training, and be angry about that, yet that focused anger causes problems in making honest cops feel like shit WHILE neglecting the much larger numbers of black-on-black murders.

Yet, blame games go both ways, so mentioning that inconvenient fact would seem to be excusing police shootings, implying police violence can be safely ignored until blacks 100% clean up their act, or like demanding police stop stealing from the drug money raids, and being told "This money is a drop in the bucket compared to the money drug dealers are making."

So its all juville thinking, literally. Every side has a list of transgressions by the other side to avoid facing transgressions on your side.

Stuart: Reality is what Obama says it is, not what it is. Ransom is not ransom when he says it’s not ransom.

Of course reality can't be what reality is if you require facts be changed to fit what you need to believe other people are doing and why.

Now Hillary has managed to position herself master of her own destiny, being in a position to lose all the swing states and still win the election.http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clintons-leading-in-exactly-the-states-she-needs-to-win/

So the LIKELY outcome, given the Clinton ability to slither out of trouble, she'll win the electoral college, and on some ugly national vote like 46% Clinton, 44% Trump, 8% Johnson, 2% Stein, but could as easily be 43% Clinton, 45% Trump, 7% Johnson, and 5% Stein if more progressives in blue states protest against corporate Hillary, and we'll have Bill Clinton's 1992 43% win all over again, AND Trump supporters will be furious that he won the popular vote by 2% and lost the election.

Stuart: Trump’s supporters like him for being rude and crude and offensive.

I think 100% of everyone will agree that NO ONE is voting for Trump for either his good looks, his small or large hands, his wealth, or his skillset in running the most powerful nation in the world.

Trump is a white symbol for "something is wrong", just like police shootings are a symbol for blacks that "something is wrong", and yet we all know, if Trump is elected president OR if all unjust police shootings are ended There will still be something wrong in America, something larger than our current thinking allows.

And everyone will be hunting their own witches in this mental fog. So we can see the result of the "somethings wrong" form of politics when you can't look in the mirror. It picks scapegoats to focus anger upon, and avoids all personal responsibilty for ones own participation in what's wrong. Your participation was just doing what you had to do to survive.

It's not fair to compare Trump to Hitler, but it is fair to say the same rage that unified the Aryan German fantasy behind an unlikely Hitler, that rage can be reformed under any grievance narrative.

So when Trump LOSES in 2016, we can be SURE 2020 presidential election will have even shadier candidates rising up, since no self-respecting person wants to run for president under these conditions.

The Great American Cultural Revolution has just begun for Left and Right cutural warriors, and also just in time for our next scheduled global recession.